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For the sake of this discussion let’s just say that leaders are people in positions of authority. Therefore, they are people who usually – though, granted, not always – have the power to act. To do something as opposed to doing nothing.

Given they (usually) have the power to act, what do we expect them to act on? In general, we expect them to act on issues of major rather than minor importance. We want potholes to be repaired. But repairing potholes matters less than protecting us from violent crime.

Of course, all leaders are not responsible for all our problems. We do not expect our potholes to be repaired by religious leaders, or educational leaders. Typically, leaders have domains within which they exercise their power, authority, and influence. And, typically, we expect them to stay in their lanes.

Which raises the question of what happens when leaders, people in positions of authority, fail to do what they are supposed to do? Fail to act on problems of major importance for which they clearly are responsible? In other words, what happens when leaders – either because they don’t care or care enough, or because they are hamstrung by their circumstance – will not or cannot lead on a matter of great urgency even though it is directly in their bailiwick?

To these questions are several answers. The first is whatever the matter of great urgency it remains unaddressed. It is allowed further to fester. The second is that followers take the lead when leaders fail to do so. Good idea, to a point. Trouble is that while followers can draw attention to an issue, mostly they cannot pull the levers of power. They simply do not have the requisite resources or access to the requisite resources.  The third answer is that if leaders do not act on a matter of great urgency, even though they are the ones directly responsible, other leaders pick up the slack. That is, leaders who are not directly responsible nevertheless step into the breach.  

Which brings us to the issue of, the problem of, climate change. Without going into the reasons why, by now it seems obvious that political leaders are not up to the job. Political leaders around the world have failed dismally to make sufficient or even significant headway toward solving a problem that every year is getting obviously, palpably, worse. Heat, drought, rising sea levels, floods, mass extinctions, failed crops, felled forests – you name it, we have it. We have it now – which is, as we all know, nothing compared to what we will have five, ten, and fifty years into the future.

What is to be done? Political leaders have proven more or less useless. Try as they might, the Greta Thunbergs of the world cannot save us from ourselves. Nor is technology the answer – it cannot reach far enough or come fast enough. Where then to turn – or to whom? Are we doomed to climate change out of control? Or is there another avenue to explore?

OK, so there’s an exception to the general rule – a leader I recently wrote about, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (A Zelig – Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – Barbara Kellerman.) He’s had a good week.

Erdogan, along with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, scored what is widely regarded as a diplomatic coup. Together they are credited with having brokered a surprising and significant agreement between Russia and Ukraine to free 20 million tons of grain stuck in Ukraine, thereby alleviating sky high food prices and the mounting threat of hunger crises, especially in Africa and the Middle East.

But Erdogan stands almost alone. Most European leaders are having a bad spell. Not only is the European continent suffering (only worse) from some of the ills plaguing the United States – such as high inflation, the threat of recession, and climate change – Europeans have problems that are uniquely their own. These include declining currencies, in several cases a dangerous reliance on Russian oil and gas, and, of course, a major land war on their Eastern flank.

More specifically:

• Widely disrespected Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned a couple of weeks ago, effectively hoisted by his own petard.
• Widely respected Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi resigned this week, victimized by the unstable politics that forever plague Italy.
• French President Emmanuel Macron suddenly faced calls for a parliamentary inquiry into his dealings with Uber when he was French economy minister.
• German Chancellor Olaf Scholz interrupted his vacation hurriedly to announce his government was taking a 30% stake in Uniper, the German energy giant otherwise threatened with bankruptcy on account of its dependence on Russian gas.  
• Volkswagen’s longtime Chief Executive Officer, Herbert Diess, was pushed from his perch. Key shareholders joined with powerful labor leaders unceremoniously to oust Diess, just when he was poised to turn Volkswagen into a global leader in the sales of electric vehicles.

There is no new lesson here. This litany is no more than, though no less than, a sober reminder of how leading in a liberal democracy has become a tough row to hoe.

            At Thursday night’s January 6^th committee hearing was an invisible man. Nevertheless, he was the star. We did not hear him, and we saw him only fleetingly (in a video clip). Still, Vice President Mike Pence was at the center of the narrative. President Donald Trump’s behavior toward him on January 6, 2021 – and his obsession with him during the weeks just before and immediately after – were not only at the heart of the story. They were the most vivid single examples of Trump’s craziness and malevolence.

            As the hearing made clear, there was an approximately 15-minute period on January 6^th when the life of the Vice President was genuinely in danger. The rioters were getting close, they were targeting the vice president (“Hang Mike Pence”), and Pence’s path to safety was unclear. Even his secret service agents feared for their lives.

Was Trump concerned? Not hardly. Just the opposite. At that moment, from his bunker in the White House, he tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.” As former White House communications aide, Sarah Matthews, put it at the hearing, Trump’s tweet was like “pouring gasoline on a fire.” She promptly resigned on account of it, as did another one of Trump’s longtime assistants, Matt Pottinger.    

Why did Trump single out Pence for special abuse? Why for that matter did the rioters target Pence particularly, with murder on their minds? Ironically, it was precisely because they had all come to expect that Pence would without question follow where Trump led. Would without question do what Trump told him to do. Would without question obey Trump’s authority – which in this instance meant he would overturn or at least forestall the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Both Trump and the mob had good reason to expect that Pence would do as instructed. For in a world full of Trump toadies no one, and I mean no one, was more of a toady than Pence. For more than four years Pence had been follower-in-chief; sycophant-in-chief; toady in chief; fawner, flatterer, and flunky-in-chief.

Pence was first among Trump’s underlings. As I wrote in my book, The Enablers, Pence will forever be viewed as “an abject subordinate who, among his other failings, not once corrected or contradicted the president’s numberless lies.” His sole qualification for his job was his fealty, his feckless and pathetic, craven, and cowardly, fealty. Or, as Mark Leibovitch put it in his recent book, Thank You for Your Servitude, “Pence was the unquestioned maestro of this top-level symphony of sycophancy…, He stood by his man in the most nakedly servile of ways.”   

Small wonder that Trump was so aghast and enraged when for once Pence was different. When for once – on January 6^th no less – Pence refused to do what Trump told him to do.

Poor president. He had every reason to expect otherwise. Poor vice president. He never understood how blind obedience is a risky business – sometimes even a fatal weakness.

It’s been reported that corporate leaders around the world are increasingly concerned about possible war in Taiwan. That China will attempt to take over Taiwan by force. While this threat seems not to be imminent, only a leader who is a fool would ignore the several warning signs. These signs should be read not only abroad but at home, by leaders within Taiwan not just by leaders without. They include:

• China’s recent takeover of Hong Kong, which originally was promised decades more of independent rule.
• China’s increasing displays of militarism, including stunts such as flying warplanes in close proximity to Taiwan.
• China’s shift from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, President Xi Jinping having by now established total control and brooking no display of dissent.   
• China’s alliance (for the moment) with Russia.
• Russia’s unforeseen and entirely unprovoked war against Ukraine – a reminder if any were needed of how in an instant the world can change.

Taiwan is officially known as the Republic of China. It is democratically ruled and thinks of itself as an independent country. Trouble is it is not similarly seen by the People’s Republic of China – the PRC, mainland China – and certainly not by Xi who not only is president but head of the once again all-powerful Chinese Communist Party. Xi sees Taiwan not as the Taiwanese do, but as an upstart and a renegade. A breakaway province that does now and always has properly belonged to China – his China.

Xi Jinping has ruled China for a decade. He shows not the slightest sign of surrendering even a smidgeon of power. In fact, he is constantly questing for more. Given the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, leaders the world over with any interest in Taiwan are well advised to pay attention.

For the last seven years, when Americans thought about the presidency of Donald Trump, they thought about him. Just him. Our fixation has been on this single individual as opposed to on the legions who followed where he led.

But in recent weeks – largely because of the January 6 Committee hearings – this has started to change. The hearings feature not Trump himself; instead they focus on his followers.  One after another of Trump’s erstwhile disciples have come before the committee to testify to their fealty to the former president – until he betrayed their trust. In fact, so strong was their tie to Trump, that in some cases, such as Arizona Republican Rusty Bowers, they testified that despite his betrayal they would vote for him again.

The other thing that happened in recent weeks is that my own book on Trump’s followers, The Enablers, which was published in 2021, finally does not stand alone. The Enablers focused on how Trump’s followers enabled his wretched performance as it pertained to the pandemic. Who exactly were these followers? It was a large cast of characters, some members of Trump’s tribe; some members, those who enabled him day to day, members of Trump’s team. In other words, The Enablers constructs a mosaic that consists of many pieces, each a person who played a particular part in the pandemic.

The two books that just joined mine – they are also about Trump’s followers – pay no attention to the mosaic that is the whole. Their lens is more narrowly trained, nearly entirely on those among Trump’s followers who are eminent. Tim Miller’s Book, Why We Did It, focuses on a few people, most long time, and top-ranking members of the Republican party. He singles out those who had always seemed to him, a former Republic Party operative himself, reasonably smart and sane, and wonders how it came to pass they sold themselves to the devil.

Somewhat similarly Mark Leibovich’s new book, Thank You for Your Servitude.  As its title implies, it also focuses on Trump’s invariably subservient underlings, though again mainly those in the upper ranks, Republican “careerists who catapulted to Trumpism to preserve their livelihoods.”

I am glad to have some company, two other close observers who focus on Trump’s followers. But their canvas is too small.

It’s at least as important we understand a follower who is an ordinary man, like Stephen Ayers, as a follower who is an extraordinary man, like Lindsay Graham. So hats off to the January 6th Committee for having Ayers testify.

Graham’s benefits from Trump-toadying are obvious. He gets to hang out at Mar-a-Lago and play round after round after round of golf with Donald. But what was in it for Ayers? Why did Ayers, an average Joe, sign on with Donald Trump? Why did he head to Washington in January 2021 to support Donald Trump? And why did he end up storming the nation’s Capital in a last-ditch effort to prolong Trump’s presidency? While the January 6th committee did not even try to plumb Ayers’s psyche, we do know that men and, yes, woman get seized by Trumpism for various reasons, including ideology and psychology.

Prominent Republicans (Graham) stand on the Republican base (Ayers). If it cracks, they fall. For years, this base has been comprised of people like Ayers, who describes himself as a family man who worked for the same company for 20 years, and enjoys camping, playing baseball, and spending time on social media. It’s why what he had to say this week in Washington was so important.

Ayers had no reason to worry about being in the company of far-right groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, because he thought,

Hey, they’re on our team; good…. I thought it was a good thing.

Only in retrospect did he get angry about Trump’s promotion of the Big Lie, that he had won the election. Why? Because for months he, Ayers, had believed the Big Lie. That it was correct to claim the election was stolen.

I was hanging on every word he {Trump] was saying. Everything he was putting out, I was following it. I mean if I was doing it, hundreds of thousands or millions of other people were doing it, or maybe even still dong it.  It’s like he said about that, you know, you got people still following and doing that.

Finally, is Ayers in retrospect, now all too well aware of how badly his life was damaged by what Trump wrought.

The biggest thing is I consider myself a family man, and I love my country. I don’t think any one man is bigger than either one of those. I thank that’s what needed to be taken, you know. People dive into politics, and for me I felt like I had, you know, like horse-blinders on. I was – I was locked in the whole time. Biggest thing for me is to take the blinders off, make sure you step back and see what’s going on before it’s too late.

There you have it. Finally, public testimony from a follower who was a rank and file member of Trump’s Tribe, explaining how it was this treacherous if not treasonous leader came to pass.

A few facts:

• Erdogan was prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014.
• Erdogan has been president of Turkey from 2014 to the present.
• Erdogan was a democratic leader.
• Erdogan became in time an autocratic leader.
• Erdogan has a lust for power – he will not surrender it and his thirst for more cannot be slaked.  
• Turkey is part of Europe.
• Turkey is also part of Asia.
• Turkey is, because of its strategic location, at the crossroad of Europe and Asia, one of the most important countries in the world.    
• Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance.
• Turkey drives every other member of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance nuts.
• Turkey is however pivotal to the Alliance – to NATO.
• Turkey is important to NATO not only because of its strategic location, and not only because it has one of NATO’s largest armies, but because it is a majority Muslim country.
• Because Turkey is majority Muslim, and because Erdogan himself is a practicing Muslim, he can relate better to some leaders in some Middle Eastern countries than any other Western leader.   

Which brings us to where we are now. Just when the rest of the West was ready, again, to tire of a major irritant, Erdogan, he has managed, again, to make himself seem indispensable. This time it is the war in Ukraine that has put Erdogan back at center stage.

Some of this is simple geography. Turkey shares the Black Sea coast with both Russia and Ukraine. And some of this is history. For years Erdogan has nurtured his ties with Moscow, both as leverage within NATO and out of a keen awareness that while Russia is an unreliable neighbor, it is nevertheless a powerful one. And, finally, some of this is the exigency of the current moment.

Since the start of Putin’s War Erdogan’s role has been central. On the one hand he has worked harder than any other single leader to negotiate an end to Russia’s blockade of more than 20 million tons of Ukrainian grain. And on the other hand, he used his leverage within NATO to block, if only temporarily, the admission of Sweden and Finland.

Erdogan has long been a thorn in the side of the West. But here he is now, poised next week not only to meet personally with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but to do so in, of all places, Tehran. Within days, therefore, Erdogan will be shaking hands with America’s two archenemies: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s President, Ebrahim Raisi.

A Zelig is a chameleon-like person who seems always, somehow, to be at the center of the action. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a leader who is a Zelig. He gets no medal for being a decent democrat. Impossible though to deny him his capacity and tenacity.

The war in Ukraine – Putin’s War – is a testament to leadership. It testifies that leadership can matter. It testifies that the impact of leadership can be transformative. It testifies that leadership without restraint can be leadership run amok – and that is evil. And it testifies that single individuals – ‘great men,” as Thomas Carlyle wrote – can change history.

We feared, correctly, that if the war in Ukraine lasted longer than a few weeks it would become normalized. And so, it has. For most Americans certainly it is now just one among many other items in the news, not trivialized but normalized, part of the fabric of our everyday lives.

It’s worth reminding ourselves, then, not just of how catastrophic this war is, but of how it defied nearly every one of our ostensibly commonsense assumptions of how the world works. Even the experts had trouble believing that what happened in Ukraine – on February 24, when Russia invaded – happened.

The pre-eminent historian of Ukraine, Serhii Plokhy, admitted after the fact, “I think deep down we really believed that history had ended. Maybe not literally … but in terms of unprovoked war.” Putin’s war, he added, was so unimaginable because it “discounted the entire history of the 20^th century, when the Ukrainian national idea grew.”

Notwithstanding our disbelief, our sense the invasion was surreal, it wasn’t. It was real. A leader, a single individual, did “discount the entire history of the 20^th century,” thereby overturning what had seemed safe assumptions. How then did this destruction and devastation – hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, millions dislodged and displaced either within Ukraine or without, large swaths of land laid to waste – come to pass?

In the weeks before the war American intelligence warned that Russian troops were amassing in large numbers along the border with Ukraine. Still, as Plokhy attests, even the best and the brightest in America and Europe found it almost impossible to believe that Putin would be so reckless, so brutal, and so cruel as to start a war solely for his own aggrandizement. A skirmish maybe. But a war?

Were we all asleep at the switch? Maybe. At a minimum nearly all of us, experts and non-experts alike, held fast to these two major though mistaken assumptions. First, that a land war in Europe 75 years after the end of World War II was inconceivable and therefore impossible. Second, that Russian President Vladimir Putin might long for the old days, the glory days of imperial Russia, but that he would not be so reckless as to try singlehandedly to recreate it.

Wrong on both counts. Putin came to believe the possibility of regaining Ukraine, reuniting Ukraine with Russia, was worth the risk of war in Europe. And Putin turned out not to be the rational actor leader the West had presumed. More precisely, while Putin behaved irrationally from our perspective, not so from his. From his perspective the prospective benefits of invading Ukraine were worth whatever the costs in blood and treasure. Whatever the costs in lives, including Russian lives, permanently destroyed, or at least disrupted. Whatever the costs to Ukraine, a free and independent state starting to find its footing. And whatever the costs to the rest of the world as in, say, a devastating shortage of food in parts of Africa.

What has Putin – along with, it goes without saying, his enablers – wrought? A major land war in Europe.  A transformed NATO. A global energy crisis. The threat of global famine. A reframed international system.

His has been one of the strongest testaments to leadership – to the ability of a single individual to make a colossal difference – in a half century or more.  

They said there were none left. They said it couldn’t be done. They said American institutions had failed. They said the United States of America – the erstwhile bastion of liberal democracy – was a basket case.  Well, they were wrong.

There are some left – political leaders who are both ethical and effective.

It can be done – reverse six years of corruption and destruction of the American body politic.

They have not failed – there is strong evidence the Congress, specifically the House of Representatives, will save us from ourselves.

The United States of America is not a basket case – with every hearing of the January 6^th commission we witness democracy in America is not only alive but well or, at least, well enough.

Far be it from me to play the part of Pollyanna. Still, let it be said that the U. S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the United States Capitol is the most important and best managed such committee in American history. If any single group of people can turn the tide of our miserable recent history, it is they. These five men and these four women.

• Bennie Thompson from Mississippi, who serves as Chair.
• Liz Cheney, from Wyoming, who serves as Vice Chair.
• Pete Aguilar, from California.
• Zoe Lofgren, from California.
• Adam Schiff, from California.
• Adam Kinzinger from Illinois.  
• Elaine Luria, from Virginia.
• Stephanie Murphy from Florida.
• Jamie Raskin from Maryland.

The hearings being held by the above committee are more significant than those that brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy. And they are more significant than those that brought down President Richard Nixon. They are more significant because the corruption, cruelty, and toxicity that characterize former president Donald Trump are more extreme than anything that stained McCarthy and Nixon. They are more significant because Trump has wormed his way far deeper into the American psyche than either McCarthy or Nixon. And they are more significant because neither McCarthy nor Nixon came as close to knifing the heart of American democracy.

One more thing: the January 6^th Committee is operating in a context in which collaboration and cooperation have become rare commodities. Political leaders especially have become known for nothing so much as their contentiousness and divisiveness.  Yet here we have five men and four women able to temper whatever their differences and able, therefore, to model what good leadership in 21st century America looks like.

They do not walk on water. Nor are they likely to pull a rabbit out of a hat.  But if any group of people can begin – note I write “begin” – to lead us out of the wilderness it is this one. No grandstanding or showboating. Instead, to a person they make the work of the country their priority.       

The leaders in yesterday’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, which had given women the right to have an abortion, were six justices who sit on the Supreme Court: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and chief justice John Roberts. The followers were the remaining three justices: Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor.  Given the leaders held the majority view, the minority was, effectively, helpless. Their dissent, no matter its eloquence, was meaningless.

The same held true for other, similar, recent decisions.  And it will hold true for other, similar, future ones, whenever the tension is between the right and the left, between conservatives and liberals. This is because the math of the court is simple: 1) nine justices in total; 2) six justices who are lifelong conservatives; 3) all justices with lifetime tenure.  This math trumps the other math – the math in which a sizable majority of Americans hold views on a wide range of issues that are opposed to those of the six justices who constitute the majority on the supreme court. As in the case of Roe v Wade, which most Americans did not want overturned.  

The ability of six justices legally to enforce their will on many millions of Americans who deeply object is a problem not only as it applies to the court but as it applies to other failures of American governance that are less political than systemic.  For example, the electoral college. Three of the court’s conservative justices were appointed by Donald Trump who, in 2016, was elected president of the United States for one term, even though he had fewer votes than did his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

What is to be done? What are the remedies for systemic, structural, failures such as ours?  The specifics are not clear. But what is clear is this. They, the remedies, lie not with people in positions of power, but with people who are not. Not with leaders, but with followers. With ordinary Americans who are so fed up with being manipulated and dictated to by those who do not represent them they take matters into their own hands. At the polls, or in the streets, or both.  

In what once was thought the cradle of democracy, the United States, the pandemic will be remembered certainly in part for the refusal to obey authority. For the refusal of millions of Americans to follow the simplest of public health guidelines, to wear a mask. Masks became politicized to the point where not to wear one was seen by large parts of the populace as a sign of their freedom and independence.

In autocracies the pandemic had just the opposite effect. In autocracies Covid was used, is used, to compel compliance. Governments around the world have employed the pandemic as an excuse to curtail freedom of speech and peaceful assembly. According to Human Rights Watch, in at least 18 countries either the military or the police physically assaulted journalists, bloggers, and protesters for criticizing in some way their government’s response to Covid-19.

Russia used Covid precautions as a pretext effectively to ban all political demonstrations. According to Daniel Treisman, writing in Foreign Affairs, those who defied the ban were quickly arrested. “The first six months of 2021 saw more than 14,000 people convicted of violating rules regarding public events, more than six times the annual average over the preceding 15 years.”

Similarly, even more dramatically, is what happened in China. The Chinese authorities have used the virus as bludgeon, as an instrument of power. Their capacity to control enhanced by the latest technologies, city officials tracked whether residents were, as they had been ordered to do, wearing masks. Home power consumption was monitored to check if residents were, as they sometimes were also ordered to do, following quarantine protocols. And some cities had sensors installed, placed on the doors of residents quarantining at home, to notify government officials if the doors were opened.

The Chinese government also ordered, implemented, and then strictly enforced total lockdowns, including in China’s two largest cities. The lockdowns were of a size and scope that Americans can scarcely imagine. In Shanghai alone, some 25 million people were forbidden to leave their homes for weeks and then months, with no permission to exit for any reason other than to get tested. While a few occasionally registered their anger – “We are not killed by Covid, but by the Covid control measures,” complained one Chinese citizen on the highly censored social media platform Weibo – overwhelmingly people complied. To stay out of the clutches of the state they had no choice.     

As it pertains to our behavior during the worst of Covid, or to our record on Covid, we, we Americans, have nothing whatsoever to boast about. But the degree to which Covid has been used by leaders to increase their power over their followers is in some cases terrifying.

What’s worse than mindlessly disobeying orders? Mindlessly obeying orders.